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Trolley helps lighten load for librarians
Moving up and down, depending on weight, meant the book needed was always on top, at an easy-to-reach level, he said.

He said the prototype trolley would put an end to bending and stretching into deep book bins, a daily problem for librarians.

Mataura librarian Julie de Villiers approached the engineering company about the problem.

"She had heard about hydraulic-based bins in the UK libraries but could not find anything like them in New Zealand, so she came to us," Mr Clarkson said.

Library break-in suspect in South Dakota a real turkey
Authorities investigating an apparent break-in at a public library were surprised to discover the culprit: a 20-plus-pound turkey.

Library director Jeanette Chaney-Moodie tells the Black Hills Pioneer newspaper that she headed into work Sunday morning after authorities called her about the incident.

Oscars' big winners will be books
Six of the nine nominations announced this week for Best Picture are based on books, reflecting a recent pattern in which the Oscar lists have consistently and gratifyingly affirmed cinema's dependence on literature. Apart from a modest lurch towards originality in 2010, the previous five years saw line-ups in which half or more of the shortlistees were adaptations, including the winners No Country for Old Men (2008), Slumdog Millionaire (2009) and The King's Speech (2011).

Larry Kirshbaum was the ultimate book industry insider—until Amazon called... Amazon's Hit Man

And now this. Amazon could be an unstoppable competitor to big publishing houses. If history is any guide, Bezos, who declined to comment for this story, doesn’t care whether he loses money on books for the larger cause of stocking the Kindle with exclusive content unavailable in Barnes & Noble’s Nook or Apple’s iBookstores. He’s also got almost infinitely deep pockets for spending on advances to top authors. Even more awkwardly for publishers, Amazon is their largest retailer, so they are now in the position of having to compete against an important business partner. On the West Coast people cheerfully call this kind of arrangement coopetition. On the East Coast it’s usually referred to as getting stabbed in the back.

Library union's pressure tactics continue
Ditto for Nunziata, who was not at all surprised with the threatening tone of the e-mails. “Instead of the union trying to intimidate councillors, why don’t they work with the city ... and bring forth suggestions on how we can make operating cuts,” she said. “All they’re interested in is keeping their jobs ... they just care about themselves.”

With This Library System, Government Isn’t All Bad
Ms. Dempsey is the Chicago Library commissioner, who is stepping down after an inspiring 18-year run. She is leaving after a remarkable transformation and amid uncharacteristic stumbles by Mayor Rahm Emanuel over library hours as the Missile and the crucial public employees’ union duel like Somali warlords.

"In the age of Google, our minds are adapting so that we are experts at knowing where to find information even though we don’t recall what it is.
The researchers found that when we want to know something we use the Internet as an ‘external memory’ just as computers use an external hard drive.
Nowadays we are so reliant on our smart phones and laptops that we go into ‘withdrawal when we can’t find out something immediately’."

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2091127/Google-boggling-brains-Study-says-hum...

How does Google's new privacy policy compare?
The fact of the matter is, Google doesn't appear to be doing anything worse than what companies likeApple, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Facebook have doing for years. It's just that Google has taken arguably unprecedented pains to alert the public of imminent changes to its privacy policies and has made the new policy approachable enough for the average person to read it. (Or skim it. Or skim what someone else wrote about it after skimming it.)

The Great Disk Drive in the Sky: How Web giants store big—and we mean big—data
The impact of these distributed file systems extends far beyond the walls of the hyper-scale data centers they were built for— they have a direct impact on how those who use public cloud services such as Amazon's EC2, Google's AppEngine, and Microsoft's Azure develop and deploy applications. And companies, universities, and government agencies looking for a way to rapidly store and provide access to huge volumes of data are increasingly turning to a whole new class of data storage systems inspired by the systems built by cloud giants. So it's worth understanding the history of their development, and the engineering compromises that were made in the process.

From Mike Cane's blog:

This, for example, is what he means by “unglue,” the concept that lies at the heart of Gluejar: “unglue (v.t.) For an author or publisher to accept a fixed amount of money from the public for its unlimited use of an e-book.”

Hellman wants us to consider, in other words, a world in which those who hold the rights to books agree to license them through a Creative Commons arrangement that protects author/publisher copyrights, enables the rights holders to maintain or pursue additional licensing agreements, and at the same time creates an environment in which public funding helps “unglue” the books for digital distribution.

Crowdfunding — something already in play within organizations as diverse as the Nature Conservancy, NPR, and Kickstarter — provides the fiscal fuel, making sure that both the creators of the book and Gluejar get compensated for their efforts.

Read it all here.

Banned books hot property in censored Vietnam
From irreverent cartoons to "depraved" short stories, Vietnam's pop culture is attracting the attention of print censors who experts say are struggling to accept an increasingly brash literary scene.

After years spent keeping political texts off the printing presses, authorities are setting their sights on the growing market of publishing for young people, with several books prohibited in recent months.

Public checks out human library books at Utah State
Organizer Anne Hedrich, a USU reference librarian, said the goals of the Human Library [humanlibrary.org] event are to open dialogues between people who may think they are different. Hedrich sought out volunteers to represent different ethnicities, religions, nationalities, occupations, characteristics and hobbies.

Abbas Al Sharif and Roula Bachour, of Logan, presented themselves as a book on their homeland, Lebanon.

Newton library worker arrested on child porn charges

A Newton library worker was arrested on child pornography charges on Tuesday.

Authorities searched the suspect’s home in Newton on Tuesday. Court papers say video files of child pornography were found on his lap top computer, as well as approximately 21 images.

The SOPA-PIPA Saga - Freedom of Speech vs. Net Neutrality
Allen Yu: "While I cheer on the defeat of SOPA-PIPA (copyright is really broken; many also consider SOPA-PIPA to be truly evil), I also have no false hopes that my interests on the Net can be best guaranteed by the likes of Google or Wikipedia or Facebook. For now, I am celebrating RELIEF not FREEDOM ."

U.S. House Drafts SKILLS Act to Support School Librarians
Three House lawmakers introduced legislation this week that could strengthen and ensure school librarians' continued role as educators in the nation's K-12 schools.

Using libraries in the age of e-books
"I discovered the convenience of borrowing e-books from the library several months ago, when I was going to take a long drive and realized at the last minute that an audio book would be perfect -- but that I didn't have any available. I remembered some advice from a friend to check out my local public library, so I went to the Brooklyn Public Library site, and found that, yes, indeed, I could borrow audio books and e-books with the right software."

Librarian's journey one for the books
A bad reaction to a medical procedure robbed Anoka County Library director Marlene Moulton Janssen of her hearing. That didn't stop her from crusading on behalf of the printed page, and now a new procedure has brought back music to her ears.

Following up on comments on a recent story, I'd like to ask the LISNews community: Are there any credible published reports of the number of US library closures in the past year/two years/five years, etc? Also welcome are findings for other countries.

Please contribute your findings and attribution in a comment below, thanks.

Shelf Check Turns 500: Best of the First 500: Sheep & Margaritas
Everyone's FAVORITE library web comic just hit the magic 500 number! Stop by to see Emily's favorites.

The 5 Books That Inspire the Most Tattoos
http://blogs.publishersweekly.com/blogs/PWxyz/?p=9288

What’s just as interesting as a tattoo is the story behind the tattoo, and that’s certainly true for the subcategory of tattoos that are inspired by famous literary works. We spent an untold number of hours combing the Internet’s two most extensive literary tattoo sites: Contrariwise: Literary Tattoos and The Word Made Flesh, then cross-checking the most frequently occurring tattoos with Google searches and Google image searches, all to get to the bottom of what books inspire the most tattoos and why. And though this isn’t a scientific ranking, it’s the closest anyone’s come to tabulating which books inspire the most tattoos, given the Internet’s evidence. What you’ll find below shows a fascinating effect: as you look past the superficial design, you’ll find a wholly specific reason, wholly specific to the individual. It’s why one person can have an “I am nobody” tattoo from Sylvia Plath and someone else can have an “I am I am I am” tattoo from Sylvia Plath–it shows how we all treat stories and writing differently.